Isabella Bird, Victorian pioneer who changed West's view of China
An unmarried adventurer, Bird rewrote the rule book of travel journalism as she blazed a trail through China in the late 1800s, taking cheap transport and facing violent mobs. Stuart Heaver reports.
An impressive new book, published by Ammonite Press and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), documents three China expeditions by a famous Victorian explorer and best-selling travel writer who had her first taste of the country in colonial Hong Kong.
As a slightly stout, middle-aged woman from Yorkshire, England, who suffered from chronic ill health, Isabella Lucy Bird hardly conformed to the stereotypical image of an intrepid adventurer.
Her first visit to the colony, in December 1878, went unreported except for the briefest acknowledgement, in the shipping section of the China Mail newspaper, of her subsequent departure to Singapore. When she returned, in 1895, as a well-established literary superstar, Hong Kong was in the grip of bubonic plague.
By then, the observations of this indomitable widower informed prime ministers, monarchs and the reading public of Britain about a China witnessed by very few Westerners. Aged 64, she was about to undertake the penultimate and most challenging expedition of her illustrious career: a 13,000km journey up the Yangtze River by boat and then overland through Sichuan province to Tibet.
Bird was a fiercely independent woman from a middle-class family who defied society's norms to become a successful writer and one of the first female fellows of the RGS. And all this in an era when European women did not engage in overseas travel unless it was to accompany their husband on a colonial career posting. Her work was often unfairly dismissed by male contemporaries as frivolous coffee-table entertainment: in reality, she ventured into the remotest of locations, often unaccompanied; took note of the local climate, fauna, flora and economy; and produced compelling accounts containing a humanitarian sensitivity and lightness of touch that were unique for the time.
Bird set the tone for contemporary travel writers by demonstrating that the journey itself was the adventure and that ordinary people often make more engaging subjects than burnished copper sunsets and snow-capped mountains.